Jimmie Higgins eBook

All the world saw what happened; it saw the glorious
revolutionary machine, in which Jimmie Higgins had
put all his trust, run into a ditch and land its passengers
in the mud. The German armies marched, and the
Socialists in the German armies did exactly what the
non-Socialists did—­they fired upon the red
flag, as they would have fired upon the flag of the
Tsar. They obeyed the orders of their officers,
like true and loyal Germans; they drove back the Bolsheviki
in confusion, taking their guns and supplies, and
destroying their cities; they led off the Russian women
and children into slavery, precisely as if they were
Belgian or French women and children, destined by
the German Gott as the legitimate prey of Kultur.
They sacked Riga and Reval, they overran all the Eastern
portions of Russia—­Courland, Livonia, Esthonia;
they moved into the rich grain country of Southern
Russia, the Ukraine; they landed from their ships
and took Finland, wiping out the liberties of that
splendid people. They were at the gates of Petrograd,
and the Bolshevik government was forced to flee to
Moscow. Of all which military feats the German
Socialist papers spoke with stern pride!

IV

Poor Jimmie Higgins! It was like the blow of
a mighty fist in the face; he was literally stunned—­it
was weeks before he could grasp the full meaning of
what was happening, the debacle of all his hopes.
And it was the same with Ironton’s Bolshevik
local; all the “pep” was gone out of its
proceedings. To be sure, some noisy ones went
on shouting for revolution the very next day—­men,
who had been talking formulas for twenty or thirty
years, and had no more notion of a fact than they
had of a pseudopodium. But the sensible men of
the group knew that their “St. Louis resolution”
was being shot to death over there in the trenches
before Petrograd.

It was interesting especially to see Rabin. The
common belief of Americans was that a Jew could not
be induced to fight; they told a story about one who
cried out to his son, asking why he was letting another
boy pummel him, and the son whispered in reply, “Keep
still, I got a nickel under my foot!” All through
the war the Jewish Socialists in America had been,
next to the Germans, the most ardent pacifists; but
now here was a social revolution managed by Jews,
here was a Russian government which gave the Jews their
rights for the first time in history! So the
little Jewish tailor stood up before these American
Bolsheviki, and with tears running down his cheeks
declared: “Comrades, I am already tru vit
speeches; I am going into dis var! I vill put
myself vit de Polish Socialists, vit de Bohemian Socialists—­I
fight de Kaiser to de death! So vill fight every
Jewish Socialist in de vorld!” And this was no
mere braggadocio—­Comrade Rabin actually
proceeded to shut up his tailor-shop, and went away
to join the “red brigade”, which was being
organized by the Jewish revolutionists of New York!